Tag Archives: Wild Fruit

In the earlier post about fruit picking, the purpose of my picked fruits is the usual: homebrew. Blackberry are bloody expensive and farmed ones are not as delicious! Anyway, In a few months, I will have, hopefully, a very delicious drink!

I favour brewing mead over other drinks because, well, I prefer to other drinks and it’s the one that is most difficult to mess up. Why? Honey, that’s why!

Ingredients:

440g of blackberries for primary and another 440g for secondary (I picked 880g, the second half has been frozen);

Zest and juice of one lemon;

1.5kg of honey;

Enough water to complete 5L;

D-47 yeast.

First, sterilize all the equipment. Leave the berries soaking in cold water and remove any creepy crawlers that float up (hey, it’s organic stuff!)

Place the berries in the demijohn (the glass fermenting thingy). There might still be some bacteria/wild yeast/general oganisms that need to be killed.

Want to sterilize fruit? Want to sterilize anything? Cover it in honey! Add half of the honey into the demijohn and leave the fruits soaking in it. Honey is anti-everything… it will kill wild yeast and other fungi, bacteria, any tiny organism in and around the berries + all the health benefits. If the amount of honey added is kept high, the likelihood of infections in your brew decrease quite a lot.

That’s why it’s hard to get mead wrong. Sanitation and infections are a big problem in wine and beer, but mead has the power of honey to back it up! Pretty cool, right?

After a good honey soaking for about 30 minutes, add 1.5L of boiling water to the demijohn and let it sit for another few minutes. Close it with the airlock/blow tube. Even though mead is harder to infect, don’t take chances! Further sterilization will occur, but this step is most important to dissolve the honey, mostly.

In a sauce pan, heat the water add the honey, lemon juice and zest. Mix until the honey has been dissolved. Add it to the demijohn and close it again. Only pitch the yeast when the most is below 25C.

Let it ferment for a minimum of 10 days (fermentation is about to stop usually when the airlock is producing only one bubble every 4 minutes). Move to secondary fermentation, add the other half of the berries still frozen and let it ferment for another 3 weeks. Then move to tertiary fermentation for another 3 weeks. The mead should be clear and ready for bottling at this stage.